Want to track articles in production on your journal?

Once you click “accept” on an article, responsibility shifts to Elsevier and we then begin the work of typesetting, editing, tagging, content enrichment and then move to finalizing, publishing and indexing the paper. You might well lose sight of articles during this period, particularly if you are an editor on a busy journal where many papers are coming and going each day. Nonetheless, we recognize that many of you do want some mechanism for keeping track of papers in the production system hence why we have been working on a major overhaul and upgrade to a system that some of you might have used in the past: OASIS.

Article Tracking for Editors (ATfE), the replacement to the old OASIS system, is a real-time production tracking service available to editors of Elsevier journals. Completely redesigned and relaunched, you can use ATfE to monitor the progress of all in-production and recently published articles. Among other activities, you can use ATfE to:

check the exact production status of your journal's accepted manuscripts

view bibliographic information for articles (once available)

access links to the published version of articles on Science Direct

view Scopus citation counts

The service is purely read-only so you cannot accidentally move articles around or otherwise impact on the production status.

The ATfE service is primarily aimed at editors who want to keep track of papers after they've been accepted for publication, but it is also of potential interest to society offices and managing editors among others.

New tools and features

Logging into ATfE presents users with two options: “Journal Summary” and “Article Overview”. The Journal Summary page delivers a broad overview of the different production milestones (i.e. where papers are in the production workflow) and the number of papers at each status. Production statuses include “received for production”, “awaiting proof corrections”, “author corrections returned”, “articles not compiled in issue” and “compiled issues”. The full list of production statuses with their definitions can be found at Elsevier’s Support Center. This aspect of the system gives the user insight into the overall production copy flow of the journal, without the need to ask the same of Elsevier journal staff.

Alternatively, it is possible to perform a tailored search via the Article Overview page, with a number of filters available. Each article in the list also displays a link to the latest published version on Science Direct as soon as available online. The article overview page lists: articles not yet compiled in an issue; articles compiled in an issue but where the issue is not yet finalized; and articles compiled in finalised issue, where the issue was completed less than a year ago. You can also subscribe to an email alert to notify you of the final publication of an article. This can be done on a per article basis or via wholesale for a batch of articles

When exploring in the system, you can filter articles by:

Article status

Handling editor name

Article type (e.g. regular article, book review, editorial)

Volume & issue

You can also run a free text search on:

Article title

Corresponding author name

First author name

Editorial reference number

PTS (Production Tracking System) reference number

How to access Article Tracking for Editors

Article Tracking for Editors is available to editors and other editorial staff of Elsevier journals. Follow these simple steps to get access:

Sign-in with your account and journal password received from Elsevier and you’re in!

We hope that the service will prove useful for our editors but we welcome feedback about the features (please pass to your regular publishing contact or Journal Manager). What’s more; we plan on rolling out further developments and improvements to the ATfE system including:

Christopher Tancock has worked in STM publishing for the past 14 years. He joined Elsevier in early 2006 where he initially worked on social science book projects before moving to journals. He has managed various portfolios as a journal publisher including linguistics, history, education, sociology and political science. He is now Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier's Editors', Authors' and Reviewers' Updates and works on related communications projects. Chris has degrees in European studies and linguistics from Royal Holloway and the University of Oxford respectively and is based in the Oxford office. In his "spare" time, he is a Community First Responder with the South Central Ambulance Service. Chris is founder of Pint of Life, a new initiative which delivers free life-saving skills into the heart of the local community.